


Dead Ends

by J (j_writes)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 01:47:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_writes/pseuds/J
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I see trains.  I see elevators, and I hear the sea, and the ocean breeze blows curtains across my vision."  She looks down at him steadily, an unfamiliar hardness in her eyes.  "Congratulations on getting your life back," she says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Ends

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted at the Inception kink meme.

He finds her in his coffee shop, bent over a sketchpad, and he knows before she looks up that she meant him to.

He takes the seat behind her, not across from her, and watches over her shoulder as she sketches structures that can't exist. "I thought you had quit," he says quietly, and she doesn't even do him the courtesy of looking up.

"You're getting me confused with you again," she tells him, and puts the finishing touches on her design. When she looks up, her eyes are harder than he remembers them. "I'm not the one who walked away."

"I never gave you any reason to think I'd do otherwise," Dom reminds her. Her chair scrapes the ground as she turns to face him.

"Me?" she asks. "No. You didn't." She tucks her pad away into her bag and latches it deliberately before she says, "He dreams about you."

"Arthur." It isn't a question.

"He asked me once," she says, looking him straight in the eye, her expression carefully flat. "What exactly it is that I know about you."

"And you told him…?"

"I told him that he'll never have to know."

"I bet that went over well." He tips back in his chair.

"He'll never see that part of you. You care about him too much." She paused. "Cared."

He swallows his coffee and pretends that his wince is from the heat of it pouring down his throat. "What do you want?"

"What happens to a dream," she says, "when it's not being dreamt?"

"I don’t…" he says, and considers it. "Nothing. It ceases to exist."

She looks at him levelly for a moment or two. "What's on the other levels?" she asks. He flinches.

"Nothing," he repeats. "They have ceased to exist."

"What _was_ on them?"

"Things that you'll never have to know."

Her laugh is abrupt and startling. She pushes back her chair and settles her bag over her shoulder. "Do me the favor of not pretending you've ever cared," she tells him. "I was a means to an end. There are four people in this world you've ever thought any more of than what they could do for you, and I'm not one of them." She pushes back her chair and stands. "I haven't stopped dreaming, you know," she says. "Yet. But I've stopped dreaming anything of my own. I close my eyes at night, and do you know what I see?" He doesn't ask. "I see trains. I see elevators, and I hear the sea, and the ocean breeze blows curtains across my vision." She looks down at him steadily, an unfamiliar hardness in her eyes. "Congratulations on getting your life back," she says. "I hope you sleep well at night."

She leaves the café, and he almost doesn't follow her. He almost sits there with his fingers wrapped around his coffee and lets her go. Instead, his shoes echo dully on the wet stones as he walks out into the rain and calls after her, "It was never my decision."

"And that absolves you of everything? That’s not how things work in the real world, Cobb. Or have you forgotten?"

They're too close by this point, the world narrowing to the space between them, and it's an effort for him to force out the words, "I forget nothing."

"You forget the things you want to forget," she says.

"You could have walked away," he reminds her. "You could have taken your money, gotten on a plane to anywhere in the world, and been gone. You could have gone back to school."

"I _did_ go back to school," she shoots back at him. "You just didn’t bother to keep in touch to find out."

"And now you're back," he says. "With…who? Everyone?"

"Everyone we need," she says with a defiant little lift of her chin, and he can't help it, he lets out a painful bitter laugh.

"Then why," he asks her again, "are you here?"

"Because we've been in limbo together, Cobb. And now your dreams are my nightmares. I thought maybe you should know that."

She's the one who pushes him, against the wall of the alley they're standing in, and the stones under his feet are just slick enough that he hits it with enough force to knock the breath out of him. He doesn't feel like laughing anymore, her face hurt and furious leaning in towards him, and when he closes his hands around her wrists to stop her, she lets out this tiny outraged noise and lunges up, kissing him like a punishment, like she thinks maybe she can give his dreams back to him.

They fuck there against the bricks, hard and hopeless and without any of the catharsis that either of them needs, but it's _something_ , it's a reaction, it's real and human and _happening_.

"That's all," she tells him when they pull apart, when he's leaning heavily against the wall and catching his breath. "That's everything I needed to tell you. It's over now." There's a resolve to her voice that would frighten him if she didn't sound so tired.

"It's not ever over," he tells her as she straightens her clothes.

She pulls her hair back and looks at him. "It is for you." There's a calm dignity to her motions as she picks up her bag and slings it across her shoulders.

"Maybe," he says, and he waits until she's walking away down the alley to say quietly, "And maybe not. James has started drawing mazes."


End file.
